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Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley This volume celebrates contemporary prose and poetry of more than a hundred women from New York's Hudson Valley. Writers from the Eastern border to the Catskills and along the length of the Hudson River evocatively address issues that touch not only women, but every reader who desires insight into the human experience. A Slant of Light is divided into five sections, each addressing a theme of women's lives. The book begins with Mythos, representations and revisions of myths on women. The second section, Body & Gender, explores visions of the body, gender socialization and the roles of women. The third section, Identity, examines both how women see themselves and how others see women. The fourth section presents women as parents, children, partners and lovers. The last, Woman in the World, shares works that meditate on our collective fate in a global world.
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In the poetry of Celestine Frost, the I is not confessional, rarely even personal, but, like he or she, a voice, subliminal and quirky. In this, her fourth collection, the liquid, unamalgamated thought of the subconscious seeps into the conscious mind as ore into stone. The resulting idiom is the real subject of her work. "This is feisty, apt writing with an appetite one very much respects. No world is ever there unless it's come into. Here's a way in!"
—Robert Creeley
"Celestine Frost's poems have the delicate touch that the surest poets command. Here is music that can devise with fire and grace."—Ed Foster, Editor, Talisman
"A brilliant song, a celebration of life connecting us to the universe. Frost experiments with language and form, creating a unique rhythm and vision--playful, profound."—Marcia Arrieta, Editor, Indefinite Space
2003 | 120 pages
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My mother said I had it, my father’s Black Irish. She loved him powerfully, as she did me. Still, I knew that couldn’t be good, the way she said it, a disease. But what exactly did it mean? – BLACK IRISH Dennis Doherty is author of three other volumes of poetry: The Bad Man (Ye Olde Fontshoppe Press, 2004), Fugitive (Codhill Press, 2007), Crush Test (Codhill Press, 2010), and a meditation on Mark Twain's classic, Why Read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? (New Street Communications, llc, 2013). Mr. Doherty’s works appear throughout the literary press. He teaches creative writing and literature at SUNY New Paltz, and lives with his wife, Shari, in Rosendale, New York, hometown to their beautiful three daughters.
2016 | 68 pages
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Zen Echoes
"It is astonishing how thousand-year-old riddles are brought here to evocative poetic life. David Rothenberg converts them into contemporary verbal music, an arcanum, a profound secret, a mystery without intellectual solution." —Frederick Franck, author of The Zen of Seeing, The Buddha Eye, and other books Much as Coleman Barks breathed new life into the work of the great Sufi poet Rumi and reached the hearts and minds of contemporary readers, David Rothenberg now brings us vividly poetic new versions of the enigmatic koans and riddles from the classic Zen Buddhist text, the Blue Cliff Record. Blue Cliff Record: Zen Echoes is an accessible contemporary distillation of this twelfth-century treasure of Zen Buddhism, a lively feast of words and images designed to stretch and open the mind. With a foreword by poet, author, and translator Sam Hamill. "David Rothenberg's adaptation of Blue Cliff Record is that rare thing, a work of art that is also useful. It is as bracing as a dive into a cold spring--a wake up call from reality--the splendor of what is." —Mark Rudman, winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Poetry and author of Rider "What is unique and wondrous about these poetic responses to the Blue Cliff Record is that here philosophy, spiritual practice and creativity are fused and whole. Each poem remarkably celebrates the Zen past and at the same time builds the foundation for a new interpretation that helps imagine how we, here and now, can live the Dharma on these shores." —Charles Johnson, winner of the National Book Award in fiction for Middle Passage2001 | 128 pages with 12 illustrations
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Translations and Transformations Fenkl's Cathay is a complex interweaving of fiction, translation, scholarship, and transformative writing. It includes new translations of the three luminaries of Tang Dynasty poetry: Li Po, Tu Fu, and Wang Wei—but that is only to whet the appetite. The volume also features the opening of the seventeenth-century Korean Buddhist classic, Nine Cloud Dream, by Kim Man-jung; an emulation of a horrific yet transcendent Tang Dynasty chuanji (“strange tale”); a magical, and yet postcolonial, revisioning of Hans Christian Andersen’s nineteenth-century fairytale, “The Nightingale”; and the enchanting story of the Shakyamuni Buddha’s conception and birth. The scope and depth of Fenkl’s achievement are astonishing. A simultaneous tribute to and criticism of Ezra Pound’s history-making 1915 chapbook of the same title, Fenkl’s Cathay is destined to be an instant literary classic.
2007 | 110 pages
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Selected Poems: 1977–2005 A retrospective view of the best of Celestine Frost's work, culled from the five volumes she has published, along with a handful of uncollected work. The work reflects her view that the poet is a lightning rod and poetry a dangerous occupation.
2013 | 218 pages
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Abraham Burickson's chapbook Charlie is an exploration of what it means to find oneself living without an instruction manual in a world filled with strangers. The poems follow Charlie and Sal, two very particular Everymen, as they navigate the emotional and intellectual straits of their lives, seeking meaning, pleasure, and some sense of self. The road is treacherous; pronouns jumble, rhythms overwhelm, and the intensity of sensual experience causes these poems to shimmer with longing and uncertainty. Charlie guides the reader on a journey that is as enticing as it is unsettling.
2010 | 45 pages
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"I could make a picture book with cut-outs pop-outs and load-ins of Burrill Street long as a cobra snaking from above the train station all the way down past the monument to Kings Beach."
2010 | 85 pages
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"Comfort, fathers of nostalgic rue? I'm charged to deliver the new, but change has shifted the shape of me; pain has twisted the make of me from all I thought I knew. Nomadic mappers of the land, I'm lost. Am I the message, messenger, or the one who heeds what calls?"
2010 | 64 pages
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The poems in this volume are experimental in nature. They came out of a study of the enneagram—a symbol best described in P. D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous. While looking for a way to experience the laws expressed in the enneagram, Frederick Bauman devised a poetic form of nine verses of three lines each. The poems are presented in the order written and then the stanzas are rearranged in the order 9, 3, 6, 1, 4, 2, 8, 5, 7. Readers interested in the enneagram are referred to Mr. Ouspensky's book and the “Holy Planet Purgatory” chapter of G. I. Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, which does not mention the enneagram but discusses the laws it symbolizes.
2007 | 110 pages
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With each poem in this series, Bauman explores the life of an animal native to the Catskill region, delving into their secret suffering, fear, and determination. Through their daily struggles, he reveals the interconnected nature of our world and our shared fears. In his final poem, he extends these same fears and struggles to man through the mythic figure of Gilgamesh. Richly detailed and poignant, Feral Idylls asks us to consider existence and our place in the world.
2010 | 56 pages
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Praise for Steve Clorfeine's work: "I found myself carried by his words...often an unremarkable or extravagantly beautiful list of things and events was made brilliant by the attention paid to their existence."
—Parabola: Myth, Tradition and the Search for Meaning
"Clorfeine's day to day experiences read like a series of prose haikus...there is a clarity in his writing...a habit of seeing the ordinary and the extraordinary, the marvelous in the mundane..."—Woodstock Times
2006 | 90 pages
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"Winner of the 2012 Codhill Poetry Chapbook Award, Heather Cousins's Freeze, as sparse and elegant as winter branches, illuminates how time is both fixed and divisible, the human paradox both archetypal and mutable."
—Pauline Uchmanowicz, Final Judge
2013 | 30 pages
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…At the crossroads of assault and proceed, with the sweat dirty gun grease of law machines, amid thrill and lull, faithless young gods inured to guts swill black smoke, uniformed, flag-fetishistic do-good recruits who brace for sanity's sake (checkpoint!) sake (checkpoint!) the creed of pluck for country and pluck for self and die in the smithy of old gods' desires... They planned it. This, the goods your works produce."
—Design at Mahmoudiya
2007 | 60 pages
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A Short Piece It must be that the azaleas Bloom at dawn And fall at dusk. Over the low pine grove Behind the rocks in Samchung Dong They droop Whenever the clouds pass. All through April Unnoticed by any This year's azaleas also Must be blooming in the shade And falling in the shade. —Kim Gwang-gyoon
2007 | 152 pages
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The poet's eye never misses the incongruity of things that cuts to the bone, "an obsidian scalpel of love" that keeps racing with her in the space between life and death, adoration and hatred. It may be that "balance is axiomatic," but always it is imperiled, a saving grace necessary, and the eye nervously glancing between heaven and earth. "Pamela Uschuk is a political poet, defiant in the face of injustice, as well as a poet of Eros. She's nobody's fool. She resurrects in her poems the brutalized, the murdered, the lost of the world—those who have no voice of their own. She pulls them close. And when she turns to the world's gliding wonders, she does so with a precise eye and everything she sees is absorbed by her uniquely compassionate voice."
—Dennis Sampson, author of Constant Longing and Needlegrass
2005 | 44 pages
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Poetry cannot perform search and rescues. Words are not water or food or shelter. Grief cannot put a roof over storm-refugees. Compassion's not a substitute for action. Come in from the wind, let words restore power. Come in under the blue tarp of this Muse.... —from "Hurricane Hymn
2009 | 148 pages
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Codhill Poetry Award Winner 2016
In Brandon Krieg’s stunning collection In the Gorge, we are placed on a tightrope, balancing the leisure of Western society against the survival of the natural world. Here, nature and human lunge and parry, conjoined twins in a struggle to the death. Krieg reminds us that our manufactured beauty is part of the planet-wide tableau—“looking down from an overpass / looking up through the canopy / the contrails the sunset / are not different things.” Part pastoral, part elegy for our future on Earth, In the Gorge urges us to believe in mercy, in redemption, and the dire need for entwining ourselves with the natural world. This is a phenomenal work.—Glenn Shaheen, author of Energy Corridor
Cornfields, jet trails and power lines, fences, abandoned mines and greenhouses—human delineations mar but do not yet overpower the nonhuman landscapes in Brandon Krieg’s stark, unerring and beautiful poems that, over and over, seek “to find the way back // to this day among days.” Krieg’s voice is watchfully tender, attentive to nature and to our moment in it, ever aware that even as we leave our signatures after us, so does fireweed. In this lovely ecopoetry, Krieg achieves a “good fearfulness” and even a joy that is no more or less elemental than rain.—Nancy Eimers, author of Oz
Intelligence at its vastest stretches to a scarcest cry, and is ours, and not: you’ll hear it amply in the haunted, restless, dead-on lively poetry to be found in Brandon Krieg’s In the Gorge, a collection that finds its author deep in it, the sorrow and the joy, and the clarities that in this poetry have a luminosity all their own, because they have been seen, because they have themselves seen through us. I marvel at the heights of technique: free verse rising out of necessity to new necessities, new flashes and new spells. Even more considerable here is the marvel of the voice as it propounds resilient—tested, lived—ways into lyric sympathies and a compassion free of attachment, taking up dwelling there, gazing across.—William Olsen, author of TechnoRage
Brandon Krieg is the author of Invasives, a finalist for the 2015 ASLE Book Award in Environmental Creative Writing, and a chapbook, Source to Mouth. His poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, FIELD, The Iowa Review, and West Branch. He is an assistant professor of English at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.2017 | 74 pages
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Most of these “fragments” were written by Jack Cain in group poetry sessions he was facilitating. The sessions were designed to be an exploration of the distinction between material arising from the subconscious mind as opposed to material arising from our ordinary consciousness. This direction came from G.I. Gurdjieff’s startling and impertinent statement that our subconscious is our “real” consciousness and our ordinary waking state of consciousness is “fictitious.” The group writing session would begin in quiet, participants would watch what arose and then write from that. Once everyone was done, the results would be read and there would be an exchange on what had been observed. These exchanges helped those present understand that we are all much more deeply connected than we realize.
2019 | 96 pages
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Conceived first as a correspondence between two woman, Letters and Found Poems expresses the mystery of their intimacy in their quotidian existence in rural New York. The complexity of Chloe’s affairs creates a damaging separation that brings a tragic turn of events. A collection of poems each had written to the other serves as a supplement to the story.
2012 | 85 pages
